It's not fair to compare OOC jpgs produced by someone else with what you like to see, and what you can do. About the best we can do is see if the images have color and sharpness that are, for lack of a better word, encouraging. And minimal noise.

I don't see anything here that should (dis)courage anyone. Particularly if you say there is better DR: that is huge step forward for the sensor, because I see lack of DR as a big problem for the Merrill. Increased DR will also reduce the color blotches and odd colors from the images.

I simply do not believe that the consolidation of the information from the two lower levels will noticeably degrade the final image on the DP2Q. None of that lower level information is going to be used without going through what amounts to the filtering information provided by the top layer. So it is mainly an increase to 20MP in that sense.

Not only that: the Merrill cameras represented a final stage in the development of a sensor concept that started out in production about 12 years ago, and that sensor concept may have gone about as far as it could go. If this is the first iteration of a new design, or perhaps the second, it's an impressive performance. They are probably (almost certainly) not finished yet with getting the most out of the sensor.

Personally, although I am very interested in the sharpness provided by the 20MP top layer, it is difficult to express how nice the images were from my SD10, which had, I think, about the same pixel density as this sensor does when used in its low resolution mode.